To all those bringing up Betamax. The DMCA makes it illegal to break any sort of encryption that protects copyright pretty much regardless of your reason for doing so. So if there is encryption, even trivial encryption, on your CD and you crack the encryption as part of the ripping process, it is a violation under the DMCA. This is true for ebooks with encryption as well.

That's what I thought too, Dan, but several people have claimed here that the act of removing copy protection is not illegal, merely the distribution or development of tools which do so.